Digisam/National coordination secretariat for digitization, preservation and access to digital cultural heritage (Nationellt sekretariat för digitalisering, digitalt bevarande och digitalt tillgängliggörande av kulturarvet) at the National Archives (Riksarkivet) is a governmental initiative given the task to support the Swedish National digital agenda within the field of cultural heritage institutions. Digisam has expertise in digital issues as applied on the cultural heritage sector, and broad networks in the complex structure of museums, libraries and archives together safeguarding and preserving historical text documents (manuscripts, published and archival material) for the future.
The CLARIN type K center will be an important complement to other tasks dealt with at Digisam, among others the work on developing a coordinated infrastructure delivering high quality in production, dissemination and preservation of digital (and digitized) documents. In the promotion of the broadest possible use of cultural heritage data a more stable connection to the language technology research community will make a crucial contribution. Digisam is in collaboration with, among others, 24 national cultural heritage authorities in Sweden, and equivalent bodies in other Scandinavian countries. Digisam in also in close communication with several university libraries and is since 2012 developing more formal links to the ECE school at KTH, Royal Institute of Technology.
Based at Digisam, the center will be in a good position to support the CLARIN infrastructure by providing orientation and building bridges to potential research materials safeguarded by memory institutions of all kinds. This will make it easier for researchers to find and make use of the rich and over time accumulated resources, and develop a more positive interaction between academia and memory institutions. In this work, the center will benefit from Digisam's regular activities: information, counseling and mediating activities in the field of digital heritage. The center will be prepared to work in cooperation with other centers and more closely support Språkbanken in finding ways to open up relevant sets of language data from the heritage field to new research efforts.
Contact: Johanna Berg, Johanna.Berg (at) riksarkivet.se